


Bene Darkmans

by ThereminVox



Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:55:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21751066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThereminVox/pseuds/ThereminVox
Summary: From Nathan Bailey's 1736 Dictionary of canting and thieving slang:Bene Darkmans-Good night.
Relationships: Arthur Fleck/Reader, Arthur Fleck/You, Joker/Reader, Joker/You
Kudos: 22





	Bene Darkmans

  
  


* * *

_Tonight_ …

Tonight was the night you had decided to venture beyond the confines of your comfort zone. To be sure, it was an average Saturday night, rife with studious affinity and booked arrangements with your vivid inner workings.

Tonight, however, was a night of errant impulse. One that enticed you to attend the Murray Franklin show, unescorted. Completely, utterly alone. Normally, the contrived atmosphere of televised events would make you recoil violently. But, tonight compelled differently. Your repulsion to the nature of insincere smiles and orchestrated laughs was retired instead to an unusual appetite for reality.

Tonight’s fabricated reality was especially seasoned. Mortality was indiscriminate to tonight’s audience. The puppeteer’s strings were fraying. The time, sedated. The cue cards, delayed in presentation. The audience’s response to riveting, murderous climax, expected, but no less unnerving to the imperious conductor. No less improvised and deserving of penance.

Then, there was _him_ …

The celestial body of comedy cosmos. Orbiting aimless through an unforgiving galaxy, if only for a number of tense, uninviting minutes. The clown of the evening. Dressed to the cat o’ nines. At least, to you, he appeared as one to « live on the edge ». Front row, his visage was an unseasonably vibrant palette. Yet, you couldn’t be fooled. Beneath the suit and makeup, he was nothing short of Death’s Head Upon a Mop-Stick. An emaciated, miserable fellow seeking to exact a rather noble agenda. Albeit poorly executed.

In spite of his near skeletal composition, it was precisely this that attracted you to him. Ineffable, poetic beauty making a xylophone of his rib cage. Skeletal beyond physicality. An imaginative X-ray scan of eyes, hollow and sunken, yet defiantly verdant with a preserved seed of life.

Sparse about the chest and famished for attention, the compulsion to make daring strides to the soles of his sensitive feet was close to irresistible. Yet, you concede to refrain. At the moment, the man was reading from a notebook. A joke, it seemed. A classic knock-knock variation. While you, alone, were listening intently, quite eager to indulge the dulcet lull of his voice, to endure, in unwanted company, the audience’s dissent, was vexing and oppositional.

Yes, his delivery was morbid and untimely, but did it truly warrant such a wounding brand of ignominy ? Did the fair jester deserve to be pilloried by insolent townsfolk, demanding of entertainment, yet nevertheless poised at the pinch with peanuts of discontent ? His harmless touch of humour, reversed to inflict irreparable damage ?

Ah, but this wreaking of havoc would appear to double The Fool, himself, as A Hanged Man. In spite of this, the cards are yet shuffled in his favour. Tonight, The Hanged Man was dealt to another. The man positioned to the left of celestial coordinates, insouciant to the adjacent star’s warning pulse of blinding luminosity. One which would ultimately unleash the fatal gasp of supernova…

Only to be reborn to a less conspicuous state of matter. Bright enough to be observed from a distance measured by all planets, yet no less forbidding in its modest size. Commanding appreciation and respect, thereby.

Before the cycle of this reformation could reach completion, a hist had to be ushered. A solemn yet forceful call for silence, attracting attention. With such gale of conviction, the man was, at present, asserting statements of truth to the unofficial court.

”I killed those guys because they were _awful_.”

The audience is uncomfortable with this incisive appeal.

“ _Everybody_ is _awful_ , these days.”

All, except you. Threatening to clamor in resistance. Still staring intensely at the man, more engrossed than repelled by his refreshing presence.

“It’s enough to make anyone crazy.”

A small, insignificant nerve of morality twinged at your conscience. Deliberating… at all odds, _misconstruing_ , his claim. Wondering if you, _alone_ , were ‘crazy’ for the polarity of your thoughts in the midst of this confused course of judgment.

Above all, you _craved_ the impending strike of chaos. Beyond the deafening brevity of silence, the intrusive, whispering assent of disorder was quickly approaching. And you hadn’t a mite of disagreement to contribute to those misleading murmurs of the jury. In fact, their repugnance was instead vocalised by the arbiter and defendant, currently at wit’s end in contentious argument.

Helplessly, your fight or flight response was evident by an increased rate of breathing. Rising blood pressure, spectral ringing in the ears, concentrated pulsations of your heart throbbing against scattered areas of flesh.

When the trumpet sounds, your ears fall deaf. Glazed vision registers the stark splatter of crimson staining a distinct name with the permanent mark of quietus.

_**It’s all just a dream** ,_ you think weakly. The noisome screams to which you wish all tongues were made dumb. Silence is what you hunger for. The mouldy TV dinner awaiting at your squalid dorm was forgotten. Silence was vital. If only for reasons of rejecting all activity that didn’t declare the (now criminal) clown as sole focus.

And, it seemed, you had captured his attention as well. Still in a daze of adrenaline, he does his little dance, effectively ignoring the damsel in distress embraced by her saviour in sooted armour. The quacksalver named Sally. The sleazy husband of another, portraying the begrimed white knight. Both petrified in their respective roles, yet nothing more than minor characters in this bizarre lover’s tale.

He makes muted steps in your direction. A trajectory that is strangely fearsome in its perplexing gait. He walks as if he balances between the border of reality and fevered paracosm.

To think, it is not the camera he aims towards…

The pleats of his slacks point keenly to you with each gradual erase of distance. In contrast, his unfocused gaze is at once conflicted yet resolute. Still, the distant cries of terror bleed profusely into the juvenile squall of night. Still, your form, secured to the seat, adhered by delayed presence of emotion. Stoic as the stone cushion.

Just as well, tonight’s moon is noticeably full. Its lunar radiance captivates the expanding vacancy of studio. Amid the disruption of regularly scheduled programming, the light fixtures had begun to flicker. Sparks projecting in variegated asterisms. The tapestried windows began to transpose themselves to hyperrealism, admitting the grace of its silver radiance in full force. The intensity of its glow outlines his wingless form as a fledgling seraph. When his lips part, the voice bespeaks with the striking cords of angels.

“You’re not like the rest of them, are you?”

The question was a paralysing tickle of rhetoric. Inexplicit in answer. His tone was doused by curiosity. Incurably childlike. Sickly saccharine words dispensed from sugared teeth as a soothing balm.

Despite these futile attempts to remedy, you were still unsure if any of tonight’s events were not fabricated illusions of a sleep deprived student. Yet, you examine this clown with careful consideration, eyes wide shut, scrutinising his alluring visage, a painted mess of hidden message. The goofy curl of his lip, crooked and exposing of snaggletooth. The crinkle of his emerald eyes, dancing with the moon, illuminating the dim expanse. Glimmering with a dangerous combination of mischief, hope and promise. That, as well, of the silly hand gesture lacing each slender finger through yours, surprisingly chilled to the bone with sudden contact.

Failure to restrain his impending laughter is stimulated by your undue flinching, accompanied by the provocation of a slight gasp as visceral reaction. Failure to respond in time, to oblige his gentle clutch and flee the scene, was magnified by the abrupt entry of two hefty figures looming in the twirling shadows. Failure to react when these figures move swiftly to apprehend and wrest the hand from yours rather viciously.

In that moment, it was serpents against swine. A blur of stiffened and flailing limbs alike in mismatched choreography. Unlike the clown, you don’t resist when the medics wrench you away, divorcing you further from your self-prescribed medicine. And, still…, your attempt to inject a potent dose of belief was persistent.

_It couldn’t be real… None of it was real._

But, his smile…

His laugh…

If nothing else was certain, the lingering stretch of that wounded, boyish smile, replete with delusions of dreams and splendor… was terrifying evidence of this obvious truth.

* * *

In pristine, white corners, two orderlies stand idly, mildly perturbed by your manic echoes of laughter. Heedless and indifferent to quell the chorus of its reverb as the trembling intensity of its sound gives a semblance of struggle against the straitjacket’s harness.

You think them fools for misjudging your benign mirth as an attempt to escape. Why would you wish to escape that which would finally aim to spread joy to needless misery?

Three consecutive seconds from the clock remind you of your place. When the click of the door’s handle reaches your ears, pure laughter subsides to shaky relief.

When your eyes open again, the vision is a clear frame of vivid spectacle. Two men in the throes of primitive aggression were dragging a half-starved man, limp and comatose, to a destination unknown.

The rhythm of your lungs return to a steady pace. The blood beneath lukewarm skin streams a settled flow through calm rivers.

The studio is emptied. Effectively purged of its pathogens. Still and all, the reality of the ordeal has yet to process its candid rendering. Fatigued and disenchanted, your steps to departure are light and heady.

  
  


* * *

As a matter of blinded course, Arthur reveled in his sprinkled delirium. Quite literally basking in its fiery glow as the street lights and infernos merged to one. Perhaps the first in three decades of listless existence, Arthur could finally say, with sincerity, that he was truly, undoubtedly, _**happy**_.

Yet, he couldn’t help the risible itch of something missing. A shard of mosaic to complete the tessellating puzzle of this midsummer night’s dream.

Mere moments before the kaleidoscope of crash fractures his drunken taste of giddy liberty, he thinks that no such freedom can exist without the force of another to share the view.

* * *

_Then again…  
  
_

* * *

Was there not _**you**_ ?


End file.
